


Child

by ottermelons (goldkirk)



Series: Words from Stardust [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, character study of sorts, sasha is a badass and also has it just as rough as everyone else, the hardened child, the hunter - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 11:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5583952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldkirk/pseuds/ottermelons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They call her a child. She is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Child

Depaysement: (n.) when someone is taken out of their own familiar world into a new one

* * *

Her life until the first death had been simple and steady. It was a child's life, unchanging for the most part, and filled with content satisfaction. When you're small and still protected by your parents from truly understanding the world, it's easy to be happy. As a child you think that you understand anger, that you understand pain and fear, that you know what it feels like to be happy.

(But is it really happiness? Can you be truly happy if you haven't yet experienced suffering? It wouldn't seem so, because children don't understand or value their ease of life and happy little ways of living until they've grown up bigger and because they've encountered more difficulty they can look back and say, "Why didn't I appreciate what I had then? Things were so much easier when all I had to do was play and learn, when all I had to do was love and be loved and time never seemed to pass at all because I didn't understand transiency—I had no concept of loss, and so I never understood that things didn't last until I finally started losing them. I wish I could go back to that now, to how things were when I was little—I wish it were still that simple. I wish that I had known how good I had it then. Why didn't I understand that when I was a child?"

And the answer, of course, is that you couldn't. How many times did they tell you to enjoy it while you could because you couldn't do those things or live like that when you were older? And how many times did you shrug and laugh, or pretend you understood  _because you thought you did but really you didn't._ Because they had done it too, not valued it until it was too late and so they were trying over and over to tell you that  _you don't know what you've got till it's gone—don't make the same mistake we did—_ but it's not your fault. It's not theirs, either. We've been stuck in the same cycle since we first took a breath on this earth, and we'll continue on in its grasp until every last human has passed away and the earth no longer remembers our presence. Because nothing has value if it's not able to be lost; life would not be precious if there were no death, and love would not be precious if there was no end, and nothing is dear to us except because we know we can—and will—lose it someday.)

Children...children do not understand that. Children have no concept of loss until that first blow is struck. For some, it comes early. For others, not until they are almost grown. Sometimes it's through the loss of comfort they used to have because of a parent's job or a home they had to leave. Sometimes it's because they got seriously ill or injured. Sometimes it's because they lose someone.

For Sasha, it was her mother. Sasha knew death. She lived with it since she was a baby. The animals died often, when they got old or sick or injured. Her family hunted for food, and Sasha, small as she was, already had killed smaller game to help out. But she was a child, and the emotional understanding that people died too hadn't set in. She had never lost anyone.

The day Anika Blouse died in a hunt gone wrong was the day Sasha first knew loss. It was the first day of her awakening, and she was no longer a child.

* * *

They call her a child. She is not.

Even as they call her a child, young, innocent, she ghosts among the trees so well even her family can't spot her and executes her prey with one shot. She always waits until she can see the animal's eyes. "I want to look them in the eyes before I take a life," she says to her father when he asks. "It doesn't make it fair, but at least they know it's coming."

It was more than she had gotten.

When she shot the animals down, she used her mother's bow.

* * *

They called her stupid. They thought her slow. They whispered, she knew, behind her back, of her not taking things seriously, of not being worthy to fight in the military.

She was more serious than any of them. She had taken lives. She had seen loss. She had lived a life where food was a precious rarity and you had to laugh in the darkness so you didn't give in and die.

Let them think what they would. Sasha knew who she was, and that was enough. If they undervalued her and called her crazy, then all the better; it only made it easier for her to survive in the end. A poisonous insect you didn't notice or ignored was more of a threat than a charging bear that you avoided or fought. She had learned early on what the others didn't know yet. 

The deadliest enemies are the ones you ignore.

* * *

When she flew in her first battles, she performed with the utmost grace and skill. She was deadly as ever and effective to a fault. She was a hunter, and the Titans were her prey. They went down again and again and she would leap away in a free fall, mouth set and their blood already steaming into nothing on her skin. But it didn't feel right. She felt something off.

Everything she killed, even people—yes, she'd had to kill other humans before, once, when she was nine and about to die at the hands of poachers; when it was kill or be killed, she'd made her choice and proven yet again that there was no child left in her small frame—she'd killed with her bow. One shot through the eye, straight to the brain. That was all it took.

These monsters, this prey...they were the only living things she'd had to kill that didn't follow that rule. They could only be killed with the blade, only at the base of the neck. No bow. No shots. She didn't know why, and it made her uneasy. It wasn't right. All living things could be killed with that shot.

If the Titan's could not...what did that make them?   
She was a hunter, and she carried her bow. But if she couldn't hunt in the way that she'd chosen, what did that make her?

What were the Titans? Why would they not die?

She buried these questions deep in her heart and refused to acknowledge them except in the darkest hours of the silent night, because if she thought too long she would doubt her purpose, and without that she would surely die.

Her unease continued to grow, and her hands ached for her bow, but she held her tongue and gripped her swords because  _she was the hunter and they were the prey, she was the hunter and they were her prey, she was a hunter and they...weren't normal prey—what were the Titans? Prey can be killed, prey can be hunted. What if the Titans were not her prey?_

She never had been good at ignoring her own instincts. This time, though she forced herself to learn, because it wasn't just her single life at stake, it was thousands. The counted on her to live, and she refused to let her down.

You're an outstanding hunter, Shadis had told her after she graduated.

Sasha wasn't sure she agreed.

* * *

She should have trusted her instincts, in the end, because just like before—just like every time before—she'd been right.

Her mother had died after ignoring Sasha's warning of danger.

Her comrades had died because they didn't listen to her instincts, or their own, and had made the wrong moves.

She stayed alive because she'd listened to her unexplainable sense. But for that one thing, that most important thing, she hadn't. She had buried her doubts and held her silence and now the world was crashing down around them because no one had known; no one had guessed, and she had been silent, and now they were paying with blood and lives.

Her instincts were right. The Titans had never been prey. They had never been the enemy.  
Prey could die. Prey could be hunted, always the same way.  
The titans were never the prey.

She knew now, how horrific the truth was. She knew what her silence had cost. She knew. She knew. The prey was never the Titans. They prey...

—she swung frantically around the pillars, her bow finally back in her hands and fire in her eyes and tears on her cheeks—fighting, slaying, dodging her death for one second more—

...it had always been the humans, in the end.

And now she knew, because just like all the prey she'd hunted before—

One shot through the eye. One promise and one second of understanding before—

Animals or people, it was the same death in the end.

* * *

She had always been the hunter. She'd just lost sight of her prey. 

There was blood on her hands. Blood on her heart. Blood of her dead burned behind her eyes every second of her waking hours, poured through her dreams when she slept. She would never escape the deaths she had caused, and there were so many. Maybe it would be worth it in the end. Maybe it wouldn't. She could only hope, and fight, and survive, like she had always done, like she would always do—

Sasha was not a child. She was a hunter.

She was born under the blood moon, born into her life for a reason. Born for blood, born to kill.   
Sasha was the hunter.  
Her prey was just a necessity for survival.


End file.
